Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
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A spokesman for a group called Soars – the Society for Old Age Rational Suicide – has praised the 83-year-old Briton, partly for putting the needs of younger generations before his own continued existence. He says that in this era with an “ageing population”, the costs of looking after old sick people are sky-rocketing, meaning that many elderly people view themselves as a “burden” that is “ruining other people’s lives”. Simply by staying alive, some old people are potentially “squandering financial resources”, we are told, and in such circumstances “a doctor-assisted suicide could be a rational moral act… the final altruistic gesture”. From this standpoint, suicide is not an act of individual desperation, or, dare I say it, of individual cowardice, but rather is a socially justifiable, even decent act of cost-cutting that will allow younger generations greater access to society’s resources and cash.

This depiction of assisted suicide as a potential social boon, which might help ease the pressure on society’s resources, explodes the myth that the fight for assisted suicide is about “rights” or “autonomy”. In truth, the driving force behind the clamour to legalise a “right to die” is a soulless, penny-pinching, deeply Malthusian belief that society’s resources are limited, and that our capacity to create new resources is restricted, and therefore there is only so much pie to go around. And wouldn’t we be better off feeding the pie to healthy, productive, younger people rather than continuing to serve up slices to the old, the frail, the useless? The idea that euthanasia might help to solve resource shortages eerily echoes humanity’s historical descents into moral depravity. The Nazis likewise justified the euthanising of very old or disabled people on the basis that such people “represent a spatial and economic burden… damaging the demands of those fit for life through the heavy expenditure which they occasion”. That is, they use up stuff that would be better given to the young and fit.